Letters: Storm Arwen has shown the folly of the green agenda

As an aside, I have yet to have it explained to me how an AHS pump is to be fitted onto the back wall of every tenement flat, in back courts with restricted vehicle access, and I see no sign yet of the further disruptive works necessary to instal car charging points every couple of metres along every pavement.

In 2013 we on the west coast of Arran suffered considerable snow drifts and a continuous seven-day power loss, but with an oil Aga, and for cooking and water heating a gas hob and a log-burner and back up mobile cylinder gas heater, life was okay. But the three aforementioned experts want us to rip all that out in preference for their as-yet only alternative, the totally impractical AHS pumps. No thank you: back to the drawing board for that idea, as the last few days has proved elsewhere.

And by the way, the diesel four by four SUV kept us mobile during that week and able to render assistance to others less fortunate than ourselves.

Neil Arthur, Kilpatrick, Isle of Arran.

FOSSIL FUELS ARE LIFE-SAVERS

PEOPLE should be prepared for power cuts. Torches, preferably the LED type, should be kept ready along with a stock of long-life batteries. Camping gas lanterns provide illumination for hours. Spare butane/propane cylinders should be available, and spare mantles. Cooking can be done on small camping gas stoves. A propane cylinder connected to a gas heater gives a lot of warmth, with a CO2 detector as a precaution. In case the water supply fails, a few sealed five-litre plastic bottles of spring water will fill the gap.

It is interesting to note that all these useful items depend on fossil fuels – plastics from oil, gas, steel which requires coking coal, and diesel machines to mine zinc and manganese (for the batteries). We depend on the products of oil, gas and coal in so many ways. Keeping fossil fuels in the ground is definitely not a good idea.

William Loneskie, Lauder.

* DAYS and days of no power. Tall trees left growing too close to power lines is the laziness of idiots.

Clear them now, no excuses; it's not rocket science but good old-fashioned common sense.

And future-proof the Grid.

Tom Begg, Lochwinnoch.

WE NEED ANSWERS TO GRID CONCERNS

IT is worth noting that Hunterston Reactor 3 has in the last few days moved to its final defuelling phase and "will not return to power generation" according to the French owners EDF Status website today, so another 500MW of stabilising synchronous generation has now been lost to Scotland. The remaining Reactor 4 is due to stop generating in January, which will leave west Scotland with worryingly low network strength (called fault level) due to our increasing reliance on renewables even though the HVDC interconnector from Wales terminates in the locality. This will affect the electrical protection response when there is network fault.

In addition, National Grid in 2018 published its concerns that HVDC links will in many circumstances not be able to transfer power when feeding low-strength areas of the network. This identified that when nearby network faults occur there will be many scenarios where the HVDC/AC converters will become unstable and our AC voltage will start to surge and oscillate at a different frequency to the 50Hz (cycles per second) that we receive in our homes, which will necessitate shutdown, meaning Scotland could not import.

I, along with many, would like to hear from Scottish Power, EDF, which owns Hunterston, and SSEN that they have fully responded to National Grid's 2018 request for input to "further explore the risk to converter instability" and that we can be confident such problems have been solved.

DB Watson, Cumbernauld.

KEEPING IN TOUCH IN POWER CUTS

OUR thoughts are with communities who have experienced the effects of Storm Arwen and our focus has been on getting everyone reconnected as quickly as possible.

We’ve been upgrading the nation’s home phones to Digital Voice and more than one million customers are benefiting already from the high-definition calling it brings. We’re rolling this upgrade out in a careful, staggered way. Customers who only have a landline with no broadband will not be upgraded until the latter part of 2023, and will not have to take broadband unless they want to.

Today, most landline handsets require power to work and this is no different with Digital Voice. We recommend customers have a backup mobile phone and calls to 999 can be made on any available network, not just your own provider’s.

For those who experience frequent power cuts and have no mobile phone signal, battery back-up packs are available. We’ll provide these for free for customers flagged as vulnerable on our system. Any customers with additional needs can contact us to get extra support.

Jane Wood, BT Scotland director, Edinburgh.

SAY GOODBYE TO FREEBIES

YET again Nicola Sturgeon makes a grandstanding announcement (cue fanfare of trumpets) regarding the £20 anti-poverty payment – “this is without doubt the boldest and most ambitious anti-poverty measure anywhere in the UK", before adding the caveat that "it will involve hard choices elsewhere in our budget" ("Scottish Child Payment set to double to £20 per week from next financial year", The Herald, November 30).

So, there you have it, say goodbye to your free cardboard box. It's either robbing Peter to pay Paul, or give the magic money tree a wee shake.

Allan Thompson, Bearsden.

IT'S HARD TO BE OPTIMISTIC

I AGREE with the sentiments so ably expressed by Neil Mackay (“Destruction of the NHS by the SNP too high a price for indy”, The Herald, November 29).

On one or two occasions I have had letters published asking how nationalists intend to protect the interests of “the weakest in society” during the period of inevitable financial turmoil that will follow independence. I have not received so much as an acknowledgement that this is an issue that will need to be addressed.

For the avoidance of doubt I, like Mr Mackay, certainly don’t "believe in independence for the fundamentalist sake of independence” but neither do I have any faith in the future of the UK under either the Conservative Party or an increasingly “centrist” Labour Party.

I have no choice but to cross my fingers and hope “something will turn up”, although I find it impossible to be anything like as optimistic as Wilkins Micawber.

John Milne, Uddingston.

SCOTLAND ON THE WORLD STAGE

MAY I point out to R Russell Smith (Letters, November 29) that what Keith Brown actually said was: "We need independence to invest in our bountiful renewable resources which are the envy of Europe. The future of the planet depends on it – and it's too important to be left to the Tories".

I'm surprised that Mr Smith believes that there are many people on the planet who have never heard of Scotland, given all the inventors, scientists, engineers, doctors and explorers Scotland has produced; not to mention the Burns Suppers held annually around the world. But if there are indeed folk out there who haven't heard of us, may I suggest that Scotland emerging as an independent nation will give the rest of the world the perfect opportunity to get to know us? As Winnie Ewing said back in 1967: "Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on".

Ruth Marr, Stirling.

TOUGH DECISIONS LIE AHEAD

YOUR correspondent E Henderson (Letters, November 29) claims that the 300 service cuts to be carried out on ScotRail schedules next April is based on an underestimate of the real number of rail users. However, whilst the statement may be correct, the conclusions are not, since the cuts are based on relative numbers of train users between pre-Covid figures and those in the current survey.

In fact, if working from home becomes the new normal for a majority of Scots, then further cuts may be required next spring to match the services to that of customer demand. It should be obvious that tough decisions need to be made at Holyrood to ensure taxpayer cash is only allocated to services required by the public.

Ian Moir, Castle Douglas.

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